I remember when Whole Foods first came out with brown rice sushi. I applauded their efforts for providing consumers with a healthier alternative to white rice, but the hard texture and the nutty flavor of the brown rice didn’t pair well with the other ingredients.

I was hungry after the Coffee and Tea festival and dropped by a Whole Foods for some quick eats. I walked over to the sushi section and noticed a giant poster board advertisement. It was for their new Multi-Grain Sushi. Instead of rice, 15 grains are mixed together where the end product resembles glutenous rice. The grains are, black rice, glutinous millet, corn, brown rice, non-glutinous millet, red bean, buckwheat rice, glutinous foxtail millet, black soybean, glutinous rice, Job’s Tears, white sesame, amaranth grain, barley, and black sesame. Also, it has a pinkish/purplish hue from the red bean.

I liked it much more than the brown rice sushi and sushi rolls. The multi-grain has a consistency to that of regular sushi rice. It’s stickier and a bit more chewy. Give it a try, I think you’ll prefer it over the brown rice sushi.

In case you are wondering what Job’s Tears are, here’s the Wikipedia definition:

Job’s Tears (Coix lacryma-jobi), Coixseed, adlay, or adlai, is a tall grain-bearing tropical plant of the family Poaceae (grass family) native to East Asia and peninsular Malaysia but elsewhere cultivated in gardens as an annual. It has been naturalized in the southern United States and the New World tropics. Job’s Tears is also commonly, but misleadingly sold as Chinese pearl barley in Asian supermarkets, despite the fact that C. lacryma-jobi are not of the same genus as barley (Hordeum vulgare).

~ Kin